UK fixed-line alpha BT has announced it will be buying a bunch of shiny G.fast kit from Huawei and Nokia to help with its ‘ultrafast’ broadband rollout.

The plan is to bring G.fast copper-on-steroids connectivity, and with it speeds of up to 330 Mbps, to 10 million premises by the end of 2020. The first places to get this broadband boost will be parts of Gillingham and Cherry Hinton later this year.

“Openreach is pioneering G.fast technology because we want to get affordable ultrafast speeds to as many people as possible in the fastest possible time,” said Openreach CEO Clive Selley, apparently keen to extol the benefits of G.fast as opposed to fibre. “We also want to deliver this next generation of broadband services in the most efficient and least disruptive way – so it is a testament to our world leading R&D team that they’ve managed to define and drive new standards with operators and equipment manufacturers around the globe.”

Huawei and Nokia were pleased, excited, etc. Adtran, presumably, was neither, while fixed-line isn’t what Ericsson is best known for. Click here for more Light Reading on this.

In other BT news the company also announced it has joined forces with Microsoft to flog Azure through its Compute Management System. This swill simplify hybrid cloud, apparently.